Finalizing Your ADR Business Brand

Finalizing your ADR business brand involves three steps, though not necessarily in this sequence:

• Honing your branding language
• Getting feedback from people outside the ADR world
• Checking to see if the brand is available as a domain name

While you’re working on the first two, you can use your work in progress to check availability as a domain name.

Honing Your Branding Language

The steps you took in the last series of exercises should have left you with concept groups, phrases that particularly resonate with you, and lots of possibilities. As with any successful brainstorm, your next step is to hone your ideas into a small list of manageable and compelling brand words or phrases. Here are some ideas for achieving that short list:

Say the phrase or idea out loud. Sometimes a phrase feels different when spoken than when read.

Type the phrase into a search engine. Put quotes around your phrase or pieces of your phrase to signal that you’re searching on specific, consecutive words. See what, if anything, turns up as a result of your searches.

Consider ways to incorporate keywords into your brand name. Keywords are the words and phrases people type into a search engine to look for services and products. The most effective keywords for your brand and for use in your blog writing are those that members of your target market are using to solve the kinds of problems for which you offer services. The best keywords are ones that aren’t overused by your competitors (“mediation”). To find keywords, I recommend WordTracker and Inquisitor.

Consider synonyms. The Visual Thesaurus is a terrific online tool for playing with words and phrases.

Consider length. Your domain name can be up to 67 characters long (or 63 characters before the “.com”). That’s a whole lot of letters. To use those letters well, choose a brand name that’s brief enough to be easily memorable but with enough substance to say something. While there’s also competing wisdom out there about domain name length, many marketing professionals seem to be suggesting that shorter is better as long as it’s got substance as to who you are or what benefit you offer.

Write it out as though it’s being typed as a domain name. Browsers recognize upper- and lower-case letters equally. So, if you’ve got a long-ish domain name to put on your business card, consider printing YourBrandName.com instead of yourbrandname.com. Still, others won’t necessarily capitalize when they type it, so make sure that when your words are strung together, other confusing words aren’t created unintentionally.

Work on your list until you’ve wordsmithed the language and honed your list to perhaps a half-dozen viable options. But don’t get too attached to any of them yet, because getting feedback is your next step!

Copyright © 2006 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.